The Natural Language Inference (NLI) task is an important task in modern NLP, as it asks a broad question to which many other tasks may be reducible: Given a pair of sentences, does the first entail the second? Although the state-of-the-art on current benchmark datasets for NLI are deep learning-based, it is worthwhile to use other techniques to examine the logical structure of the NLI task. We do so by testing how well a machine-oriented controlled natural language (At-tempto Controlled English) can be used to parse NLI sentences, and how well automated theorem provers can reason over the resulting formulae. To improve performance, we develop a set of syntactic and semantic transformation rules. We report their performance, and discuss implications for NLI and logic-based NLP.
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